Client Story: 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ delivers success for SBS

While the rest of the world was watching the games, Janrain was watching user registrations spike

Arguably, there’s no bigger global sporting event than the FIFA World Cup™. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™, fans all over the world turned out and tuned in to support their nations’ squads. Two Janrain clients, SBS in Australia and Fox Sports in the United States, were in the midst of it all - broadcasting the matches and streaming online to a range of devices including desktop, mobile and connected TVs.

Janrain, with its global identity cloud footprint, was assisting with the consumer viewing experience, managing registrations, authenticating accounts and authorising access to live streaming and recorded content. As the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) provider to both SBS and Fox Sports, Janrain had to deliver core consumer experience services through the most aggressive traffic spikes without any degradation of service.

Janrain Senior Customer Success Manager, Joel Krivosha, began working with SBS and Fox Sports months before the World Cup to begin planning. “Both broadcasters expected there to be a significant surge in traffic - particularly in the minutes leading up to start of each match,” Krivosha said. “Their login and account creation processes had to be up to the task.”

Janrain’s 24x7x365 cloud operations team was measuring and analysing the traffic as our identity cloud auto-scaled in the regions needed to meet viewer demand. As SBS and Fox audiences were coming online to watch the games, our team was monitoring surges in real-time to make sure we were staying ahead of system demands.

An unprecedented spike in viewer subscriptions

In the weeks leading up to the World Cup, both Janrain and SBS knew that an onslaught of new user registrations and logins by returning users was coming.

“On the first day of the World Cup, SBS saw a 1000% increase in registrations,” Krivosha said. “When the Australian national team opened play, user registrations were 1500% higher than on a typical day. These spikes occurred despite the fact that the games were scheduled at times when there would normally be relatively light streaming traffic.”

“SBS’s extensive coverage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ played to the strengths of each of our platforms, across TV, radio and digital. This year’s tournament marked SBS’s most comprehensive multiplatform sporting event coverage ever, giving Australian football fans new ways to expand their experience”, said Noel Leslie, Chief Technology Officer. “Audiences increasingly expect the best possible viewing across multiple platforms so SBS collaborates with partners who are built to scale, including Janrain, to ensure that we’re able to deliver a seamless experience.”

“Janrain is focused on the most complex of use-cases; clients who have enterprise-class, mission-critical requirements” said Jim Kaskade, CEO of Janrain. “This is how we differentiate from our peers in CIAM. If you need infinite scale at millisecond performance that is available 99.999% of the time, then you only have one partner to choose.”

The Janrain Identity Cloud is uniquely architected to manage millions of identities - with the elasticity to withstand massive traffic surges without sacrificing data rigor or system performance. With the support of our service team in planning for the event and our operations team in monitoring our systems, Janrain was able to support SBS to deliver a seamless registration and authentication experience for audiences.

About SBS

As Australia’s most diverse broadcaster, SBS holds a unique place in the Australian media landscape, inspiring all Australians to explore, respect and celebrate our diverse world and in doing so, contributes to a cohesive society. Today, SBS is a modern, multiplatform media organisation with a TV portfolio spanning four distinctive channels on free-to-air; an extensive radio service providing 68 communities with programs in their own language; and an innovative online and digital presence ensuring SBS is responding to the changing needs and demands of audiences.

SBS has been a Janrain client since 2012. During this time their subscriber base has grown from 100,000 to more than five million. SBS leverages the traditional registration and login, social registration and login, SSO, authentication and customer insights services of the Janrain Identity Cloud. For more information, visit sbs.com.au

About the author

Greg Griffiths

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Greg Griffiths brings more than 15 years' experience marketing SaaS solutions in the enterprise IT, publishing and education arenas to Janrain as our Senior Product Marketing Manager. Greg drives much of Janrain's content and works across groups to ensure cohesive and articulate presentation of how our products and services align with the needs of our clients and the larger market. An analytics geek, Greg also steers much of Janrain's internal SEO and conversion initiatives, as well as new product launches.

When Greg is away from our Portland office, he's likely enjoying time with his kids, near a trout stream, in a hammock, with a Faulkner novel close by ... probably all four at the same time.